Every year Thanksgiving Day is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. This day was historically a religious observation to give thanks to the almighty God. The occasion traditionally celebrates the arrival of the first pilgrims to America.
Thanksgiving Day is a time to feel gratitude for the good things in life. This is a day of festivity, family reunions and lavish feasts. In the USA this day is considered as one of the major family celebration generally celebrated at home with family and friends. The traditional dishes like Roasted turkeys, Cranberry sauce, Corns. Potatoes and Pumpkin pie are included in the Thanksgiving meal.
People celebrate this day with a great enthusiasm with their family and friends and sometimes give gifts like flowers, jewellery, baked cookies, chocolates etc to their near and dear.
Behaviorism (also called behavioral psychology) refers to a psychological approach which emphasizes scientific and objective methods of investigation. The approach is only concerned with observable stimulus-response behaviors, and states all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment.
The behaviorist movement began in 1913 when John Watson wrote an article entitled 'Psychology as the behaviorist views it', which set out a number of underlying assumptions regarding methodology and behavioral analysis
miércoles, 30 de agosto de 2017
***Psychology has been defined in different ways. Some people have defined psychology as an art. Other people have defined psychology as a science. Many text books define psychology as the science of mind and behavior. Psychology involves the study of human nature and/or behavior. Different opinions come from different perspectives.***
Eric Pettifor at GIGANTOPITHECUS defines psychology as "an art which presents itself as science". Eric is most interested in the area of personality psychology. His web page provides various psych links to sites that cover areas of humanistic psychology, teaching clinical psychology, consciousness, and the Canadian Psychological Association.
H. D. Hamm Ph.D., who authored and maintains a site for Northern Michigan University, defines psychology as the "scientific study of the behavior of humans and animals". Dr. Hamm states that "there are many areas of psychology, each attempting to explain behavior from a slightly different perspective". He gives a brief discussion of what psychologists in different areas are concerned with.
Tom Bolling at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington defines psychology as a science of description and application used for the "interpretation, prediction, development, and improvement of human behavior" and that psychology was originally a branch of philosophy.
The general psychology students at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida provide a number of psychology definitions in their unique presentation of "Definitions of Psychology" which they've gathered from several sources.
Burrton Woodruff at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana developed an HTML Teaching Resource (WH3) called "Definition of Psychology" where he gives many definitions of psychology.
Castleton State College in Castleton, Vermont provides a broad definition of psychology, lists the skills that a student can gain by studying psychology, and gives examples of possible careers for psychology graduates.
martes, 16 de mayo de 2017
THE GUIDE FOR FINAL EXAM 1ST AND 2ND ROUND ARE THE BIMESTRAL EXAMS.
jueves, 26 de enero de 2017
What is the Scientific Method?
The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions. Does this mean all scientists follow exactly this process? No. Some areas of science can be more easily tested than others. For example, scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star's life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses. When direct experimentation is not possible, scientists modify the scientific method. In fact, there are probably as many versions of the scientific method as there are scientists! But even when modified, the goal remains the same: to discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining the evidence, and seeing if all the available information can be combined in to a logical answer.
Even though we show the scientific method as a series of steps, keep in mind that new information or thinking might cause a scientist to back up and repeat steps at any point during the process. A process like the scientific method that involves such backing up and repeating is called an iterative process.
Whether you are doing a science fair project, a classroom science activity, independent research, or any other hands-on science inquiry understanding the steps of the scientific method will help you focus your scientific question and work through your observations and data to answer the question as well as possible.
Cognitive psychology is the scienitific study of the mind as an information processor. Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking and consciousness
The cognitive perspective applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but have also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies (e.g. KF, HM). Cognitive psychology is also a reductionist approach. This means that all behaviour, no matter how complex can be reduced to simple cognitive processes, like memory or perception.
Typically cognitive psychologists use the laboratory experiment to study behavior. This is because the cognitive approach is a scientific one. For example, participants will take part in memory tests in strictly controlled conditions. However, the widely used lab experiment can be criticized for lacking ecological validity (a major criticism of cognitive psychology).
Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid 1950s. Several factors were important in this:
Dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior rather than internal processes.
The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behaviour and psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human information processing, using strict and rigorous laboratory investigation.
Information Processing
The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, to become the dominant approach (i.e. perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in mental processes had been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolman.
But it was the arrival of the computer that gave cognitive psychology the terminology and metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind. The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.
The use of the computer as a tool for thinking how the human mind handles information is known as the computer analogy. Essentially, a computer codes (i.e. changes) information, stores information, uses information, and produces an output (retrieves info). The idea of information processing was adopted by cognitive psychologists as a model of how human thought works.
The information processing approach is based on a number of assumptions, including:
Information made available from the environment is processed by a series of processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, short-term memory);
These processing systems transform, or alter the information in systematic ways;
The aim of research is to specify the processes and structures that underlie cognitive performance;
Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.
Mediational Processes
The behaviorists approach only studies external observable (stimulus and response) behaviour which can be objectively measured. They believe that internal behaviour cannot be studied because we cannot see what happens in a person’s mind (and therefore cannot objectively measure it).
In comparison, the cognitive approach believes that internal mental behaviour can be scientifically studied using experiments. Cognitive psychology assumes that a mediational process occurs between stimulus/input and response/output.
The mediational (i.e. mental) event could be memory, perception, attention or problem solving etc. These are known as mediational processes because they mediate (i.e. go-between) between the stimulus and the response. They come after the stimulus and before the response.
Therefore, cognitive psychologists’ say if you want to understand behaviour, you have to understand these mediational processes.
